17 Stone Angels (11 page)

The bald man's teeth sparkled. “Here listening to the maestros,
General
!” Nodding to Gladys: “Señora!”

“And . . .” Bianco focused his square gold-framed bifocals again on La Doctora. “How is Buenos Aires? How is the Waterbury case?”

“You're familiar with the Waterbury case?”

“Of course!” the Chief said. “That case is known at all levels. We're very interested in seeing you and Comisario Fortunato solve it.” He got a pained look on his face. “But you left very little time!”

“Leon is the Comisario General of the Dirección de Investigaciones,” Fortunato explained. “That's a position of some rank.”

La Doctora didn't react to his importance. “What do you think about the Waterbury case?”

He turned to Fortunato. “It was a matter of drugs, no, Miguel?

Drug deals go bad all the time. One side wants more, or someone gets tired of waiting for his money. Possibly this Waterbury tried to get a lot of money fast, and he got in with people he shouldn't have trusted. That's common. The jails are full of retards who had a bright idea that couldn't go wrong.”

“But why would they kill him over cocaine and leave the cocaine in the car?”

“That was an accident,” the Chief said.

“Athena,” Fortunato added slowly, addressing her informally for the first time, “the criminal world has much to do with chance. Outside of novels and films, there are few criminal geniuses. Often the plan is like this: go into the place, take out a gun, get the money, and go. Very primitive. Then things go wrong. Unexpected things happen. People appear without warning or the victim acts in unforeseen ways, and then things develop on their own account. What I mean is, we can't be sure that there was a clear motive for this murder.”

“What is sure is that we will do everything possible!” the Chief said firmly, dropping his fist on the table. “The victim had children, no?”

“One daughter.”

“
Dios mio
!” Gladys said.

Bianco shook his head silently, lost in visions of revenge. “A policeman can't make promises,” he said at last. “But before this finishes . . . .” He swiped the matter aside with his open hand. “We shouldn't have entered into this subject. It puts me in a bad way, and I don't want to ruin the evening. Monday I'll get a copy of the
expediente
and we'll see if I can give a hand. Norberta!” the Chief hollered. “Champagne. Get me the national. The
chica
must try the national, so she can see that we have nothing to apologize to the French for!”

Gustavo had rested and now launched into the sentimental “Cafétin de Buenos Aires,” barking out in sonorous tones his melancholy recollections of the café where he learned about life.

“He's doing better with this one,” the Chief commented. “He's warming up.”

The champagne came and they toasted La Doctora's arrival in Buenos Aires, then it was the Chief's turn to sing.

The sight of the Chief up there with his white performer's jacket always struck Fortunato as slightly humorous, even after these many years. Bianco cleared his throat and took a long drink of water. “ “Mano a Mano,” he told the musicians sternly, and they launched into the classic, now some seventy years old. As the chief began singing, his face took on a look of haughty strength, verging on arrogance. He was making a perfect
cara de policia
.

“This is one of the most classic,” Fortunato explained.

“I can't understand it.”

“There is much
lunfordo
. The theme is thus: the singer loses his woman to the rich playboys. She throws their money to the passing crowd like a lazy cat playing with a miserable mouse. The man is crushed, but he resists. He says, when you are old and ugly, and they've put you out on the street like used furniture, don't forget your friend, who will still help you with advice, a loan, or in any way he can.” Fortunato gave her a soft look. “He still loves her.”

The gringa cocked her head and her guarded features warmed to the romantic sentiment. “That's beautiful.”

“Yes,” he answered, “it's beautiful.”

The Chief sat down to applause and launched into a long discourse on tango and the deleterious moral effect of
rock ‘n' roll
. The grill disappeared and Fortunato ordered more wine. The Chief asked Athena to dance and after some initial stumbles she repeated the basic step over and over again for two minutes. Fortunato enjoyed her bashful smile as he danced past her with Bianco's wife, and on the next number, as something inevitable, he took her in his arms. A formal approach, fingers touching, his other hand politely behind her shoulder. He tried to downplay his embarrassment by lading her with compliments and teaching her another step, and in their mutual discomfort she lost her enigmatic distance and became a young woman in a bar in Buenos Aires, dancing with a man old enough to be her father. For an instant, he wanted to kiss her.

They left at three, when the coffee could no longer hold off her exhaustion. The bookstores on Corrientes had closed and the furtive elements of the city were flitting in the darker passages. Gangs of street children at Plaza Misereres lounged half-naked and wild, looking for a victim, while the base of a grand statue crawled with spray-painted slogans against the International
Monetary Fund. Athena hadn't said anything in a long time, and Fortunato's absurd situation came down on him again. Waterbury's murder. His wife's death. And him between the fangs of both those events. He looked over at La Doctora; her head had lolled back against the seat, her mouth half-open in the sleep of the innocent. She looked young and childlike as the shadows skated over her skin.

“It's so easy for you,” he confided softly. “You eat a few beefsteaks, make your report and go home. Us, we have to go on living in this whorehouse.”

CHAPTER
EIGHT

T
he next morning Fortunato had a busy round of police work. An overloaded lumber truck had rolled over two months before and seriously injured a pedestrian. Now the insurance company wanted the
expediente
to disappear. “Fifteen thousand,” Fortunato told their lawyer. “And follow the safety regulations next time.” They'd picked up a
puntero
the previous day, and his lawyer had come in to make the arrangements before they officially recorded the arrest. “Two thousand five hundred,” Fortunato said. Meanwhile, a string of burglaries on the western edge of the district indicated that someone was robbing on their own account, and Fortunato put Inspector Nicolosi on it. Nicolosi could be depended on to plod doggedly behind the criminals until an arrest was made. A good man, Nicolosi, but he had one defect that made it impossible to trust him: he was honest.

In the midst of it Fabian appeared at the door. Today he approached the fringe of respectability in a burgundy jacket with a black turtleneck, but a flashy bronze medallion hanging by a thick chain dispersed the effect.

“What's happening with the chain, Fabian?”

“The style of the Sixties is coming back, Comi. If I'm going to circulate among the youth and find -”

Fortunato held up his hand. “No, Fabian. Save the verses for the adolescents at the dance clubs. I have things to do.”

“Precisely, Comisario, And for this, I have come to offer my help.” Fabian stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. He flashed a brief Romeo smirk. “As you are a man that has many responsibilities, I thought perhaps I should help La Doctora with this matter of Waterbury.” He raised his hands defensively. “Knowing, of course, that this is something to be approached, as you say,
tranquilamente
, and that you have your own sources of information, I thought that in the spirit of, can I say,
entertaining
La Doctora, to show that we are good hosts, I could donate some of my time, perhaps familiarize her with the methods of the Buenos Aires police, with the city and its cultural treasures—”

Fortunato pointed to the door. “Go, Romeo. Go.”

“It was a suggestion!” he said, backpedaling.

“Go.”

“She's a pretty girl, Comi!”

“Go!”

La Doctora spent the morning
in the conference room looking over the
expediente
. Fortunato checked on her periodically to offer her coffee or answer questions. She was filling page after page with notes, an activity which made Fortunato apprehensive. In the afternoon they embarked on a round of field trips. First, they went to meet with Judge Duarte, who had been the On-Duty judge when Waterbury's body had turned up. Duarte had the manner for this job: fair-skinned and severe, about fifty, he spoke little and gave off an air of unshakeable integrity. He wore the accolades of the Sociedad Juridica and the Rotary Club on his office wall. But Duarte was no working stiff. He was clever at designing investigations which studiously avoided the obvious, or seeding them with technical violations that would invalidate the case in court. And when it was time for a case to go to sleep. Duarte could send it to the bottom more permanently than the
Titanic
.

His performance that afternoon reached its usual high standard.

Even when La Doctora obviously overplayed her hand, calling on the righteous indignation of her government, Duarte didn't break character.

“Speaking on behalf of the United States,” La Doctora said, “we are disappointed that so little effort was made to solve this case.”

A less disciplined man might have at least smiled, but Duarte even
managed to reflect her outrage back to her. “I too am disappointed!” Pointing to the huge stack of
expedientes
awaiting prosecution, some of which were earning him a healthy fee for their lassitude: “But look at the case load they give me! All of these people are waiting for justice. Some of them are guilty and some, surely, are innocent. So on one hand, I have an unidentified body with chalks of cocaine and no suspect, and on the other some poor man, perhaps innocent, sitting in a
calabozo
for a year waiting for his trial. Whose case should I advance?”

He returned to the difficulties at hand: the lack of conclusive forensic evidence, the absence of witnesses or associates to provide information.

A trace of inquisitorial fire came to her eyes. “Why weren't his old contacts at AmiBank interviewed? This
Pablo:
he might know something! Why didn't anyone call his wife to see if she had pertinent information? Those seem like the most basic elements of an investigation! Why weren't those things done?”

Duarte listened to her attentively, sidestepping the threat. “What we need in this country are ten thousand more people like you, Doctora. Then, yes, perhaps we could get the resources we need. My voice is hoarse from asking for them.” He offered a truce. “But now we have the undivided attention of Comisario Fortunato, a man of much experience and excellent reputation. Remember that the Comisario directs some forty men, yet he is taking time from his own investigative work and his administrative duties to render assistance to you.” He shrugged. “And don't forget that as a consequence, someone else's case is sitting without attention.”

La Doctora seemed frustrated but she said nothing more. They exchanged stiff goodbyes and Fortunato brought her to the scene of the crime, now overgrown with a summer's worth of weeds and their blown stalks. Ferocious thistles and grasses reached to the waist, a little piece of the old pampa trying to reinstate itself on its ancestral lands. They got out and walked around. In the bright afternoon light the shuttered factories had lost their fearsome desolation. La Doctora put her hands on her hips and stared again at the spot where Waterbury had been finished, as if trying to insert the dark tableaus of the murder photos into the sunny lot. She strode out to the sidewalk and looked up and down the half-abandoned street. “I don't know, Miguel.”

He could sense her frustration, and he thought for a moment she was going to make an open accusation about the way the investigation
had been handled. She started to say something about Duarte and then held herself back, lapsing into silence. Things were not going well. She was showing an unpleasant determination to get beneath the surface, and if she became too militant she might complain loudly enough to bring in the FBI and the Federales.

“I live only a few miles from here,” the Comisario said at last.

“Why don't you come to the house? We'll take a
mate
and try to figure what direction to go next.”

He left the car on
the street outside his kitchen window and returned the silent wave given by the woman across the way. Marcela had always had good relations with the neighbors, but things had gone rotten a few years ago when the police had shot one of the neighborhood teenagers dead under suspicious circumstances and Fortunato had appeared in the newspaper defending the officer. He'd had no choice, he told Marcela: a comisario had to back up his men. Besides, the boy had been up to
something
. When Marcela died, no one had come to offer him condolences.

He unlocked the door and they stepped into the cool, dim interior. He put a kettle of water on the stove.

“Is this your wife?” the young woman said from the dining room.